Reading At Occupy Amsterdam

Monday, February 6, 2012

After the reading group sessions ended as the tent of Artists In Occupy Amsterdam was taken down, the group is now focusing on writing an Anthology of ideas, tactics, concepts to be used in future activist projects.

Right now, the group is writing. However, we are still interested to expand our range of contributors and subjects. In the Occupy-style, we are working in a way that is structured to be as open as possible. So if you should have an idea that you think might fit the project, or if you know anybody who you think should contribute, please send us a note at readingoccupy@nul.nu.

The text below is from the original call for contributions. It offers some ideas, that were meant as a starting point. The actual lemmas that are being written and that are still to come may differ wildly from the original suggestions.

1. The Occupy movement is usually criticized for not having a vision. In truth, Occupy was a name under which a grand panoply of visions could operate. Instead of a lack of vision, then, Occupy rather offers an excess of visions. One goal of the Anthology is to counter this criticism by offering as many proposals and visions as possible.

2. The present phase of Occupy Amsterdam, and of the project of the artistsʼ tent, is evolving into a next stage. We need to investigate the elements of the political vision, in terms of goals, strategies, analyses as well as tactics, that made the Occupy formula work, so that the Occupy experience can help guide future forms of activism. How can Occupy be extended – outside of the Beursplein camp, into the future, into the rest of the city, the country, the world? Another use of the Anthology would be to function as a guide, or a manual, for future actions.

3. The Anthology should have a very open form that can include texts of many different kinds and authors: texts written especially for it, by people from the tent, from the camp, or even from outside. It should address a great variety of subjects.

4. As a form that can accomodate this, the Anthology will be organized into lemmaʼs, like an encyclopedia.

5. A lemma entry could be any kind of text, from short definitions to full essays or stories, or even works of art (drawings).

6. There may be multiple entries for the same lemma. These may even contradict one another (thus, we might have 5 different and mutually exclusive definitions of “utopia” or whatever).

7. The texts should be clearly written, readable for an interested general (non-specialist) audience, while not eschewing complexity where necessary and offering completely uncompromising visions. The text as a whole should be attractive to browse.

8. The texts should contain something that is useful for the future, develop concepts or ideas or visions that could possibly be applied, or be relevant for future action somehow. Itʼs great to criticize the world as it is and to reflect on past experience, but even better to describe the world as it should be, or to propose ways that might transform the world. The visions may however be outlandish, impractical, [seemingly] impossible or even outright crazy.

METHOD

A core group of editors will collect texts, by approaching people who might have ideas, solliciting texts, or perhaps finding existing texts that might fit into the anthology.

The group will establish lists of lemmas, to which anybody may add their suggestions.

The group will assume responsibility for final edits (in collaboration, of course, with the authors).

As of yet, we still need to decide on the final form of the project (kind of publication, language tactic) and the way it will be distributed.

LEMMAS

Hereʼs a (very incomplete!) list of possible lemmaʼs that might serve as a point of departure for structuring the project. This list was compiled just off the top of my head and is very open to extension and revision.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

In session 23, we will look at assembly structures, using the "Quick guide on group dynamics in people's assemblies", compiled by the Commission for Group Dynamics in Assemblies of the Puerta del Sol Protest Camp (Madrid), as a point of departure, and Barthes' essay "To the seminar" as a source for reflection. The Quick Guide can be downloaded here, and Barthes' text can be found here.

The text for session 24 is a short, but quite openly structured and wide ranging interview text of an e-mail interview I conducted with composer/artist Tao Vrhovec Sambolec last year. I choose this text as a starting point for reflections on the organization, and possible reconfiguration, of space: a topic that is coming up in certain discussions regarding the potential future development of the Occupy movement and its strategies. The text (which ended in mid-conversation) can be found here.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Session 22 of Monday, nov 21 will be devoted to a text by German theatre philosopher Guillaume Paoli, Gesamtkunstwerk Khaddafi, on the former Libyan dictator's "state situationism". Click here for the Dutch translation (as published in nY#11), and here for the German original. Hope to see you there! Session starts at 11:00 at the green army tent (colloquially known as the "artist's tent").

Thursday, November 17, 2011

"Therefore I say Communism is – it must be – style, beauty, sex & love. It is daring and freeing. I feel it to be so. In this stage, when its form of existence is a taboo, by all means it is chiefly daring and freeing."

Sunday, nov 20, at 15:00 we'll look at a text by German poet Ann Cotten, reflecting on Brecht's "Der Choral vom Baal". In her reflections, she develops a personal interpretation of communism. Cotten wrote the text for Poetry International festival in English. The original text can be found here; click here for Marc Kregting's translation into Dutch (which was published in nY#11). Brecht's original German poem is here; there's an English translation here; and Catharina Blaauwendraad's version in Dutch is here.

Please note that this session will start even later than usual for Sundays, at 15:00 instead of 13:00. But those interested are welcome to enjoy another session taking place on the same day, at 12:00: the new workshop series organized by Nguyen Vu Thuc Linh, a session with Robin Celikates, which will focus on Critchley and Zizek. (Here is an announcement on Facebook).

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

There are many interesting interpretations of the piece on Youtube; most, unfortunately, show only excerpts or are otherwise fragmented. Nonetheless it's worth browsing through them to get a sense of what kind of approaches the piece allows.

I've also uploaded a version that was performed 10 years ago in a concert I organized with the Munich-based ensemble Piano Possibile.

Sunday, November 13, 2011

This morning, November 13, the largest gathering of the reading group so far, some sixteen souls, took a critical look at the 2nd book of Rousseau’s The Social Contract and how it compares to the theory and practice of Occupy politics. Tomasz Kaye and Samuel Vriezen report:

The impetus for reading this text came from a Facebook discussion about concerns that a micro-bureaucracy might well have been born within Occupy. This happened just after decisions had been made in a general assembly about the right of peacekeepers to exclude those designated as 'troublemakers' from the square. By investing a group with such powers, there seemed to lie a danger of becoming the thing that the occupiers protest against. There was even a suggestion made at a G.A. to set up a tribunal (which was rejected). Assembly meetings, then, seemed to be moving into a territory of 'Rousseau-sized dilemmas' rather than issues of activism proper.

The Occupy Amsterdam group can be seen as a community that 'needs to be governed' (or, to phrase it in a Rousseau-like fashion, it might be a society ripe for law). Its pretensions to governance have in fact made the Occupy model a target for criticism, along the lines of: "Your model isn't perfect, so it's worthless!".

Actually though it’s already important that Occupy offers a 'critical counter-sound' to the widespread sense that our representative democratic governments fail to be representative (if 'representative democracy' isn’t even an oxymoron). By contrast, Occupy would then set an example of an 'extreme' democracy of unanimous assent. This can be seen as a performative gesture, a symbol, and not necessarily as a proposal for how the world should work.

Still, the consensus approach taken by Occupy includes certain tensions, not least of which is the possibility of social pressure on a lone dissenter to abide by the will of the majority. There might also exist internal barriers to participation, some hesitance to take part. Not necessarily out of shyness: there also exists a reticence for aesthetic reasons, as some people might feel more like observers than like participants in the process. (Certainly among artists, hesitations of this kind are endemic).

To help deal with these tensions, we undertake a critical reading of the tensions and contradictions within Rousseau’s thought.

Rousseau's position can be roughly characterised as: State power derives from the common good and is legitimised by its service towards that aim. Rousseau's critics have presented him as the 'founder of totalitarianism'. His vision does bring to mind Orwell's dystopia, and the brutality of the 'total state' in it's various forms in the 20th century. Similarly, some have expressed worry/fear at the direction of Occupy. Practices like the human mic can seem to have an oppressive character, pressure towards a uniform society. Fear that Occupy could be a proposal for how society should be ordered. The invocation of the '99%' also brings to mind the spectre of the 'tyranny of the majority'.

Still, studying Rousseau might be useful for a critical look at democracy or at assembly processes, starting from a central question that his work addresses: how can we understand general will?

Rousseau developed his theory of general will in opposition to Grotius and Hobbes, who both believed that the people surrendered their sovereignty to the state as part of the social contract. In contrast Rousseau believed that the sovereignty of the people (which he also calls 'the sovereign') was inalienable, and that a ruler's legitimate power could only derive from their service to the sovereign:

I hold then that Sovereignty, being nothing less than the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated, and that the Sovereign, who is no less than a collective being, cannot be represented except by himself: the power indeed may be transmitted, but not the will.

Though seemingly not identical to the common good, the general will is always good. However, Rousseau believed that the will of all the individuals comprising the people may not necessarily coincide with the general will. Therefore, the people will often need to be educated, 'enlightened', to correctly learn what they, as a people, really want.

This is cause for controversy. Why call it ‘will’, instead of 'the good' or something like that? Is this name an attempt to rationalise coercive government by framing it as a voluntary agreement? One answer might be found in Rousseau’s consistent opposition of “general will” to government, which can only ever derive from it; therefore, the concept of general will can as much function as an instrument for criticising power, as it might become an instrument of coercion.

But there is a further problem. Assuming that the general will exists, but that there's no guarantee that it coincides with what the people want, how can anyone know what general will is?

There is often a great deal of difference between the will of all and the general will; the latter considers only the common interest, while the former takes private interest into account, and is no more than a sum of particular wills: but take away from these same wills the pluses and minuses that cancel one another, and the general will remains as the sum of the differences.

Rousseau suggests that general will is derived from the 'cancelling out' of opposing particular wills. But how does this kind of equation work? And is this really compatible with the idea that the general will is always good – wouldn't a sufficient number of 'bad' particular wills threaten it? Can we describe a hypothetical simplified scenario where we detail all individual wills – we can use imaginary units to quantify intensity of felt desire if necessary – and the general will that results from them? If we can't do this, how do we actually know what general will is?

Rousseau’s use of metaphors from arithmetic and accountancy, being quite vague technically, raise at least as many questions as they answer: it is indeed hard to actually imagine a strict mathematical model for what Rousseau was imagining. In fact, in elaborating his concepts, Rousseau’s writing style often suggests that he felt the need to elaborate them as he was going along (witness the regular appearance of phrases exhorting the reader to patience, along the lines of “All my ideas hold together, but I cannot elaborate them all at once.”) The concept of general will even might be an unfinished concept in itself: one that is in continuous need of further elaboration.

For example, a more recent discipline like game theory can suggest other ways of thinking about how the universal aspect of the concept might work than were available to Rousseau. If the choice of a system of law would be like a game which one plays, and if one would play from a perspective of full understanding of society but without any knowledge of one’s own particularities, what kind of law would one choose? Obviously, not a law that would discriminate against certain characteristics, since there might be a chance that one would fall into that category oneself. General will, with regard to law, then, can be understood as that body of law which a (perfectly informed) person would choose to live under, if 'it' knew nothing about the particularities of ‘its’ situation (social class, sex, background etc).

The difficulty is that this assumes that a person can make decisions somehow independent of 'who he is' – which is a collection of particularities. Does this perfect observer finally choose to maximise wellbeing, for instance, or justice, or liberty or something else? Isn't it the particularities of the observer that locates their mix of preferences between these potential poles?

In fact, the concept of equality itself is historically constituted. Equality before the law doesn't prevent one person from being legally exploited, if that person is not recognised to be a member of the group of equals. (Witness the history of the emancipatory struggles even within democratic nations that were late to recognise the rights of women, abolish slavery, etc. – a contemporary challenge would be to recognise the political rights of “illegal” immigrants).

It appears that Rousseau’s cherished value of equality must be constantly challenged for it to retain its ethical force. The social contract may look like a finished text, but should not be read that way. Similarly, the Occupy concept of “consensus” can only retain its political force if it in fact is the expression of a political dissensus, a contrast with how democracy is more usually carried out, by ballet box.

To use the concept of general will today, then, might require an update, which includes an awareness of our imperfect understanding of it. At this point, different approaches were seen in the discussion group. One approach is skeptical: we may have to remain agnostic about the general will. Another suggests that a more full understanding of the general will would itself include this kind of agnostic distance as proper to it, which would yield something like a negative theology of the general will. This second, paradoxical, position again was criticised, since it might lead the concept of general will into an impasse in the postmodern manner, and so fail to realise the affirmative and creative potential of the concept of general will for activist opposition to existing styles of governance. Finally, general will might have to be seen as a concept to be constantly extended, as it undergoes permanent transformation through succeeding episodes of dissensus.

Now, however we understand Rousseau’s concept to work in practice, and whatever inadequacies such a practice might have, Rousseau does insist that the general will as such is infallible:

It follows from what has gone before that the general will is always right and tends to the public advantage; but it does not follow that the deliberations of the people are always equally correct. Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is; the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived, and on such occasions only does it seem to will what is bad.

But in a footnote it is revealed that Rousseau's general will has a 'dirty secret': it is formed through equivalence and antagonism, 'the art of politics'. Agreement between particular wills is reached in the context of a third position which disagrees with both. This suggests that a universal general will cannot exist.

The strategy of Occupy however rather focuses on opposing its own form of politics to that of “the 1%”. In acting out its direct democracy, its claim is to do something that does more justice to the “general will” today than the “1%” do (alongside their sidekicks within conventional parliamentary politics). Basically, Occupy’s performative claim is that the conventional structures no longer serve the general will, but that they serve particular wills instead. To this, Occupy opposes a new universalist politics, one of shared opinion. This reflects Rousseau’s critical use of the term - general will was an antidote to absolute monarchy.

But if we would be willing to understand Occupy as more than a merely critical gesture, but as an affirmative gesture, what kind of politics would Occupy itself be the foundational gesture for, then? Here, the question of Law comes in, and its relation to the divine in Rouseau.

The general will acts as a principle that stands above the monarch, from which he derives his power. In that sense, the general will replaces God, by whose grace, traditionally, monarchs have explained their divine right to be rulers. At the same time, however, Rousseau saw God as the sole source of justice:

All justice comes from God, who alone is it source; and if only we knew how to receive it from that exalted fountain, we should need neither governments nor laws.

This divine source becomes of practical importance in the institution of the Lawgiver. The problem of the Lawgiver is that he can’t himself be part of the legal system, or the founding political law would not serve a general will. Therefore, Law essentially has to come from outside; and Rousseau notes that Law (as legal form of the general will) is in practice almost invariably attributed to a divine source.

In fact, it seems that God is necessary in two places: firstly, as the source of justice, which is an essential attribute of the general will, and therefore God is a condition for the existence of the general will; secondly, as the initiator of Law: the particular legal form that the general will takes. For Occupy, the question then would become what its equivalent of God might be.

Certainly, the institute of the general assembly, and its mode of operation itself, is often credited with a similar kind of metaphysical charging power. Thus, the existence of the general assembly as such has often been invoked in the practice of the artists working in the artists’ tent at Occupy. On the one hand, the artists are critical of the assembly, but, on the other hand, it is recognised as an institution without which the artists tent would not exist, and the artistic practice taking place (including the reading group itself) would not have meaning.

The divine, and the general assembly, are the inscrutable starting points by which the respective systems are able to come into existence. The whole project remains finally dependent on a leap of faith, since if the people don't know what general will is, and if we don't know a mechanism by which to derive it from particular wills, then how can anyone claim to know its content? This indeterminacy remains at the heart of Occupy as a critical political gesture. If general will must needs remain an open category and subject to dissensus, it should be part of the duty of the general assembly to keep its workings open. The critical, hesitant stance of the artists may have a role to play here.

Friday, November 11, 2011

On November 3, the reading group looked at the Nieuw Babylon project of Constant. Katja van Driel reports:

Sessions on utopian thought continue: This time the model of New Babylon by artist/architect Constant Niewenhuys, or to be more precise, a catalogue text in the form of a manifesto written by Constant himself, is the scaffolding of reflection on the possibilities of the Occupy movement and on the state of contemporary society. Right in the beginning we find a striking parallel image to the setting of Occupy: Constant developed the vision of New Babylon after he saw a miserable and precarious gipsy camp and thought about better structures for the nomads. While Occupy still is pretty much on the ground, Constant had something different in his mind: He wanted his architecture to fly and to circulate.

Constant designed architectural models for a utopian society where inhabitants live in a totally open and flexible city structure that can expand into every direction, just like liquid. The architecture is a mirror of the way of life of the New Babylonians. They are only guided by their creative drift which leads them, keeps them moving and finds no limits, neither in society nor in the physical structures that surround them. This way, the New Babylonians can act out their being human without boundaries and realize the ideal of the Homo ludens. This drift can also clearly be associated with libidinous propulsion. New Babylon has reached the terminal point of technological progress with a „society that knows neither famine nor exploitation nor work“. However, Constant depicts the New Babylonians as figures from a far future that speak to us which immediately reveals also the absolute utopian character of his model. What do they tell to us? Maybe we hear rather different things than Constant did.

The discussion starts with the question whether Constant's Utopia has not been, at least partly, realized, today. Couldn’t it be that we are now living in a kind of New Babylon but just without its fantastic, utopian aspects and if that is so how come?

With his vision Constant has anticipated a great deal of the flexibilisation of life and work circumstances which characterize our contemporary society. His ideas about networks and individual possibilities for broadcasting come rather close to the internet for example. His vision belongs to a period when the belief in progress was still undaunted and the welfare state wasn’t in question.

But similar to a notion that has been made earlier in connection to the text of Shukaitis, the dreams of the 60ies and 70ies have seemingly turned into the nightmares of today. We experience an increase of mobility but at the same time we are losing points of orientation and identification. Could it be that we are also less aggressive (as Constant states his New Babylonians will be)? The flexible worker is one of the major new figures that have appeared over the last decades. This mobile individual circulating inside our global economy is the symbol of a tendency towards alienation. As there is barely an opposition to the grievances these individuals encounter, the current system has possibly been able to channel aggression, but more as a perverted version of what is described for New Babylon, because it is not sublimated into something positive but makes the flex worker support the system that erodes him. Ownership is an important factor in this mechanism: the freedom as imagined by Constant was possible only because everything would be common property.

The dynamics which, in New Babylon, are born out of the unbridled creativity can also be compared to the mechanisms that are caused by the globalized flows of capital. All boundaries have been withdrawn so that if shockwaves run through it, the whole system is affected. This uncontrollable flow of energies is able to create unimagined consequences.

The question could then be how to channel the above mentioned dynamics in different ways. Some 40 years ago Constant was looking for ways to overcome constrictive social conventions. Today we are generally rather looking for alternatives which can also include having such things as a home or a family life, but without them leading to forms of oppression.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

On Sunday the 13th, our reading group will embark on an investigation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract. In this, our 16th session, we will take a look at the 2nd book. This session will take place at 13:00. Come and bring friends!

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Wednesday, november 9, in the morning, Albert Camus' classic text l'Homme Révolté, a.k.a. The Rebel, a.k.a. De Mens in Opstand, gave rise to a lively discussion of some 8-10 voices at the green army tent at Occupy Amsterdam. Daniel Rovers reports:

- Why this text?

- And, why did Hans Achterhuis mention this text referring – in a positive way – to the Occupy Movement?

- Hans Achterhuis?

- He is the so called Thinker of the Fatherland in the Netherlands.

- Basically this is a text about saying No. It’s not about gradual improvement, it’s about radical change. That’s why it can be considered a text useful in thinking about this Occupy movement.

- But is Occupy really about beheading the master? Aren’t things a lot more complex, aren’t we all in a way involved in the system we want to radically change?

- This notion of a master-slave relationship as quintessential for a rebellion, as Camus writes, it is highly problematic. Specifically what he writes on page 14, saying that the ‘problem of rebellion only seems to assume precise meaning within Western thought’, and that, and he is agreeing here with Scheler, ‘that the spirit of rebellion finds few means of expression in societies where inequalities are very great (the Hindu Caste System) or, again, in those where there is absolute equality (certain primitive societies).’ That is to say that rebellion in the colonial world is not legitimate.

- And the interesting aspect is that he wrote this text in 1951, after the independence of India, Indonesia.

- The problem here is that Camus wants to counter Scheler in his thesis on humanism and resentment, arguing (Scheler was) that humanists are good at loving humanity, but do not love really human individuals. Camus wants to develop a more militant, or less vulnerable version of humanism. But in striving for a new universalism, he arrives only at (t)his Western version of universalism. This being the reason for a more post-structuralist thinker like Foucault being anti-humanist; arguing that humanism, as developed by European philosophers, was just a fancy way of universalising Western man.

- And that why it is so interesting that Achterhuis evokes this text. Him being a former Maoist who came to be a vehement critic of all sorts of utopian thought. He is a classic sort of post-ideological, post-political leftist thinker. Playing safe. Why not mention Fanon in this respect, or Zizek, or Rancière – who actually take universalism one or even several steps further.

- Ok, so in this respect this text is absolutely dated; but what about what Camus writes abouts values – that a rebellion already entails a specific value or set of values. I quote: ‘Not every value entails rebellion, but every act of rebellion tacitly invokes a value.’

- That is the paradox or contradiction in this text; on the one hand denying the possible rebellion in non-Western cultures, on the other hand saying that every rebellion involves certain values – which then can or could be universalized.

- And could we then not say that in that respect what is lacking in Camus’ thinking, is what is lacking, or rather, what is so disturbing in the ideas of the current radical enlightenment, translated into politics by, for example F. Bolkestein and A. Hirsi Ali, namely the absence of a really universal way of thinking.

- A way of thinking that you could call multicultural?

- I don’t know if you should call it multicultural, being a highly contested term; although it can’t overstated that this kind of radical ‘enlightenment’ stops at the border, so to say, it draws a line between who is in (The West), and who is out (Islam and the Islamic World). Where as really Enlightenment is –

- Sorry, but the problem with these discussions is that we are having them for so long now. Let’s not forget why we are here, that is not because of some cultural difference, but because of this overwhelming, devastating system called capitalism. And multiculturalism, in the end, is a product of capitalism, in that it clearly defines a value system of different essential ‘cultures’.

- Ok, you’re right. Although I hesitate in making a classic Marxist move of blaming it all on the system, one should indeed focus on the economy. The economy of this Occupy movement and camp in the first place.

- What I found interesting to see here, is how Occupy deals with these problems, civic problems basically, or multicultural problems, if you will, on ground level. Dealing with the homeless, the drunk, the so called outcast of the system in an alternative that is set up around the idea of radical equality.

- That’s right, and I see two tendencies, two ways of thinking about these real problems here within the camp. The first one being of care, that Occupy should be a movement that through care makes a point, makes the world a better place as well, creates goodwill, and so forth. The second being that Occupy is not a charitable organisation, and that one should aim for higher, political goals.

- But it’s not about people who cause problems, and those who don’t. It’s about people who contribute, and those who don’t. In The Hague, for example, one of the most active people in Occupy is someone who has been homeless for more than 4 years.

- And so then we ask ourselves again the question: is this a Rebellion? We know the criticisms of the so called outside world – that we are just a bunch of spoiled brats who are not willing to go all the way and sacrifice themselves.

- Well, to again refer to Camus, maybe it is very important that this is not about all or nothing, about outside or inside, about rebellion or resentment. It is, and that is what I find so fascinating, being here with your body, sleeping here, and in that way sacrificing something, your time, your autonomy, in a way. And what I also observe is a reconfirmation of what classical marxism called the ‘Common’, the stage before property was being claimed, transferred, sold. This is also a very concrete way of thinking again about the common.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Session 13 will be on monday. The text will be an interview with Toni Negri by Pascal Gielen and Sonja Lavaert, published in the recent collection Community Art: the Politics of Trespassing. The interview text for the reading group can be downloaded here.

Tuesday's session is canceled.

Session 14 will be on wednesday. Text: The Rebel by Albert Camus (recently invoked by Hans Achterhuis to explain the Occupy movement).

Session 15 will be on thursday. This is the first session of what I hope will be a series, in which we "read" works of art and the way they deal with some of the recurrent themes of our reading. In this session, we'll look at the Chilean song El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido and Frederic Rzewski's grand set of piano variations on the song, The People United Will Never Be Defeated. We'll look at these works for how they think the unity of the people in its diversity: a motive that first came up in our discussion of Merijn Oudenampsen's text on populist imagery.

Here is a link to the text and an .mp3 of the song itself. Composer Christian Wolff's program notes on the music can be found here.

The Rzewski piece itself is extensive, consisting of a theme and 36 variations, taking about 50 minutes. I've uploaded some mp3s of the piece: these are the links for part one - part two - part three. The interpretation is Ursula Oppen's, who is the piece's dedicatee. On Youtube, there is a thrilling bravoura interpretation by the Liszt-specialist Marc André Hamelin, which projects the score at the same time; it is in 8 parts however, and the editing is imperfect, so two variations end up incomplete.

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Session 12 will be held on Sunday, nov 6, at 13:00 (instead of 11:00). We're reading Asef Bayat, a fragment from Life as Politics - How Ordinary People Change the Middle East. Download the selection here.

Session 13 will be on monday at 11:00. The text will be an interview with Toni Negri by Pascal Gielen and Sonja Lavaert, published in the recent collection Community Art: the Politics of Trespassing. The interview text for the reading group can be downloaded here.

Tuesday's session is canceled; the reading group will continue on wednesday. Texts TBA.

The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and, yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

Imaginal Machines offers texts on the practice of political activism. Some main strands of thought running through it are a background in autonomist thinking, a critique of post-fordist labor conditions (including an awareness of the importance of immaterial labor), and an awareness of the affective political aspects of everyday life. The chapter under discussion, titled Questions of Aeffective Resistance, focuses on the importance of affective work, a type of work that is not usually acknowledged as "effective" because it is so much just about building social relations as such, rather than building infrastructure and systems and eventually "effectively" realizing utopian worlds. Rather than maintaining this distinction, Shukaitis wants to think affect en effect as one: hence aeffective resistance.

Utopian thinking has a tendency to make us feel guilty about not being effective enough, for example at moments when we tire of working towards our grand abstract goals. Somehow, certain forms of highly visible, spectacular resistance tend to be interpreted as more important because we think of them as more "effective". They also tend to be too grand to be effectuated during our lifetimes, which can easily become an instrument for keeping us feeling guilty, which might seduce us into ever greater forms of self-sacrifice. But the mere effort to keep our commitment going requires a different kind of work, that does not break headlines quite as much, but that is equally important as a part of any kind of activist struggle. It's the kind of work that keeps activist organizations capable of operating at all, which requires quite mundane tasks of community building, of caring for one another, and of caring for oneself. Such kinds of work need to be acknowledged as proper part of activist enterprises as well.

Shukaitis' chapter traces how these themes were developed particularly in the tradition of feminist activism, and how certain groups have tried to get domestic work, but also other forms of generally care-related labor (work involving giving attention, care, or sex), recognized as properly part of capitalist social relations and proper subjects for revolutionary activity. Examples given include Wages for Housework campaigns or the activity of the Spanish Precarias a la Deriva collective. These have tried, starting from a feminist perspective, to map out where and how these largely unacknowledged forms of affective production can be shown to exist as fundamental to our economic system, also with an eye to their potential as sites for resistance.

From the perspective of Occupy, stressing this kind of work, that is very much about nurturing a good environment for activism, is very relevant. What continues to be puzzling about Occupy for many people - including for people who are sympathetic to it - is that for them, it seems not sufficiently concerned with realizing a clearly defined political agenda (which one might expect from an activist group that seeks to have some "effect"). However, this is missing the community building aspect of Occupy, the experiments that it constitutes in maintaining alternative forms of collaboration as such.

Looking at two central institutions of Occupy might clarify this. The human mike style of holding assemblies can be seen as an aeffective strategy, which structures debates themselves very much in ways that make every voice part of the community. What the human mike technique allows for goes far beyond simply solving the problem of having a meeting without electronic amplification. It is a very physical, active way of building the community in its decision making process itself, as everybody gets to physically contribute to the discussion being held, and as everybody is involved in the amplification of each other's voice. Thus we all get to identify with the voices of others who are involved. Indeed, even though the human mike is not necessary in Amsterdam for legal reasons, at the very first meeting it was decided to adopt this device anyway because of how it helps structure the assembly as a community in a less hierarchical way.

The other important institution is the camp itself. Very much of the energies of those present at Occupy is involved in the kind of caring work that makes it possible to keep a camp up at all: cooking, cleaning, and making sure the atmosphere remains pleasant enough. It is important to see those tasks not merely as subordinate to the main task of creating some abstract utopia. In fact, they are every bit as much part of the activist effort.

Here, the discussion made an interesting link with an important sub-theme in the chapter, that of the opposition between "care" and "security". The latter refers to neoliberal society's hangup with being safe and having your property well-protected. An economy based on more acknowledgement of care, however, might work in a very different way. Indeed, aspects of the Occupy experience seem to resonate with this notion. Some participants in the discussion group have been particularly active as part of the peacekeeping groups, patrolling the camp at night, trying to contain potential conflicts. It was noted during the discussion that during the general assemblies, the tasks of care (cooking, cleaning, etc) seemed to be given more priority, accorded greater importance, through being discussed at greater length, than the peacekeeping tasks. Also, the peacekeeping efforts within Occupy tend to bring up more complicated fundamental tensions between the very inclusive nature of Occupy (which would have the camp be a completely unlimited place welcoming everybody, including inebriated nightly visitors who are simply interested in having a good time) and the need to keep some kind of order. There have even been cases in which an over-applied security logic has actually led to the escalation of conflict (as a rowdy group of visitors was pushed away from the camp with more zeal than was necessary to get them to quiet down and leave). It might be an interesting challenge to see if the peacekeeping function, too, could somehow be thought from a care-type paradigm. Peacekeepers more as the "mothers" and "fathers" of the camp than as its "policewomen" and "policemen".

The text also brought about a lively discussion of the relationship between the everyday and political activism. It can be read as a call for recognizing the importance of everyday life and activities as integral part of the political, not only in recognizing care as a site for labor, but in the very importance of care as such - for each other, but also for oneself (sleeping, eating well, taking a shower, feeling OK, taking the time to think are part of the revolution, too). As it was noted, one thing that is attractive about Occupy is that it allows you to "do nothing and still be part of the revolution" by simply living your life with Occupy - simply hanging out in a pleasant way is already a first level of involvement, and one does certainly not need to be constantly producing activist spectacle. Thereby Occupy gives a model for transcending all too strict divisions between "action" and "non-action", a motive that chimes in with the old question within revolutionary politics of the rift between doers and thinkers. In the end, both are needed; we need time to rest and reflect as much as we need time to act, and sometimes, refusing the sense of urgency can be an important part of activism.

Thus, if tendencies exist that separate "the political" as a sphere from day to day life, these must be resisted. (Such tendencies are particularly virulent in the Netherlands, in which there is a widespread culture of believing that politics is what happens in The Hague, and with the importance, say, of racist & sexist struggles within daily life tending to get downplayed). This realization led to a discussion of the Occupy Amsterdam camp as a site for politics. The question was raised if O.A., for all its openness and deliberate avoidance of particularist interests or programs, might not still too easily fall into the trap of becoming itself a closed-off space. Already there is a sense that this might happen as tourists stop by and take pictures of the camp, as if visiting from some other world, ignoring the fact that their own lives are in fact part of politics, too. Shouldn't the camp find ways to open up more? Perhaps it could advertise its needs for people who like to be involved in very "normal" tasks more? Make it clear that Occupy wants to consist of more than activists, hippies and the odd intellectual, but needs cooks, cleaners, and people with all kinds of skills? Find a way of saying to passing tourists "Wish you were here…"? On the other hand, of course the realization that daily life is political is not something that should only be enacted on the Occupy grounds as if they were the privileged place to live a political life today. The message could equally well be "Wish we could come with you" - that the visitor to O.A. takes the realization of the politics of his or her personal life home with them.

A third motive in the discussion was how the text raises this question of the visibility of the aeffective. The discussion in the text of the "care strike", as proposed by Precarias a la Deriva, suggests that a strike - the withholding of care - might be a way of showing the capitalist economic system the extent to which it founds itself on care work (in a clear echo of Aristophanes' Lysistrata). This does however imply that such visibility might only articulate itself in capitalist terms: a care strike functions, because it makes the product "care" economically scarce. One wonders how long this strategy might remain in accord with the revolutionary potential of care, attention, etc. insofar as care could be an unlimited resource: a form of pure production. In fact, in offering somebody care, attention, sex etc. in ordinary (non-remunerated) social relations, the "producer" enacts his or her desire as much as the "consumer" (and probably gets as much out of it). The logic of lack seems at odds with the potentially unlimited profusion of care. Might the politics of care not need to be articulated, and be made aeffective, in ways that are entirely outside of capitalist social logic?

Or would that mean a retreat for such politics, because the struggle with[in] capitalism would then continue to ignore the aeffective dimension? As Shukaitis himself puts it in the text,

[...] one cannot overlook the very real forms of labor, effort, and intensity that are required for the on-going self-constitution of communities of resistance. To do so all too often is the ways in which patterns of behavior that communities in resistance are working to oppose and undermine (sexism, racism, homophobia, heteronormativity, classism, etc) reappear, as people falling back on structures of thought and assumptions that have become normalized through their daily lives in other ways that often get looked over precisely because it assumed that they been dealt with.